POLITICAL SCIENCE ALUMNI NEWSLETTER FALL 2012
LETTER FROM THE HEAD DOES PEACEKEEPING HELP END WAR? SCENES FROM THE 2012 STUDENT RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM AND AWARDS CEREMONY
LETTER FROM THE HEAD William Bernhard
I hope you’re enjoying the summer. Although the weather outside has been unrelentingly hot, we are enjoying our new home in David Kinley Hall. We made our big move last fall and, although it was difficult to move during the school year, the transition went incredibly well. The happiest change is that it is easier for students to visit our offices, giving us more opportunity to interact with them outside the classroom. We hope you will visit us the next time you are on campus to see the new facilities. And I am pleased to report that the refurbishment of Lincoln Hall is now complete. While political science is not returning to Lincoln, some of our classes will be taught there. The building itself looks great—the architects took great care to maintain its historical character while updating it to include all the modern amenities one would expect in this day and age. The College is organizing many festivities surrounding the formal opening of Lincoln Hall this fall. Please look for the announcements. I also want to take a moment to talk about the Department’s dedication to the excellence in teaching—a topic I’ve discussed before. But it bears repeating as, once again, our faculty have recently been recognized for the dedicated efforts in the classroom. This spring, Professor Tracy Sulkin won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching—the third year in a row that a political scientist has been recognized at the College level for their pedagogical achievements. Last year, Bob Pahre won both the College and University awards for his teaching. And the year before that, Samantha Frost won the Lynn Martin Award for Distinguished Women Teachers. In addition to this local recognition, Paul Diehl, a former winner of College and University teaching awards, was awarded the inaugural career award for educational excellence this spring. And here in the department, our honors stu-
dents voted to award John Vasquez with the Clarence Berdahl Award for achievement in undergraduate education. This is an outstanding record of accomplishment for our department and welldeserved recognition of our faculty’s commitment to undergraduate teaching. But what makes it even more remarkable is that these faculty are among the best researchers on our campus, consistently producing books and articles that shape debates in the discipline and beyond. John Vasquez, for instance, has produced three books in the last three years. Paul Diehl’s recent book, Evaluating Peace Operations (2010), just won the International Association of Conflict Management’s 2012 Best Book Award. I could go on, but the point is this: our faculty win teaching awards because they are outstanding researchers. They bring their intellectual curiosity and passion for inquiry into the classroom. They allow students to experience the excitement that comes with making a breakthrough and the satisfaction of preparing a persuasive argument. And while they do it with different teaching styles and approaches, they all share a dedication to connecting their research interests to their classroom instruction, to help students find their own intellectual passions. I am proud to be part of a department that consistently ranks as excellent in both teaching and in research. I hope you all have an enjoyable summer. We’re looking forward to a busy electoral season this fall and hope you will take part in our informal poll to predict the results. See how your political science training pays off with your prognostications by winning a prize for coming closest to the actual result!
Best, Bill Bernhard
Cherry blossoms between English hall and the newly-remodeled Lincoln Hall on the uiuc campus.
dear friends,
DOES PEACEKEEPING HELP END WAR?
warring sides are less likely to negotiate when a peacekeeping force is sent into a conflict, making long-term peace less likely, says political scientist Paul Diehl, in an article cowritten with J. Michael Greig, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas.
Could peacekeepers actually be a detriment to ending a war and finding long-term peace? An analysis of conflicts since World War II shows that that’s the case more often than not, say two experts on the subject. “In general, peacekeeping actually reduces the occurrence of diplomatic efforts aimed at settling conflicts,” according to co-authors J. Michael Greig, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas, and Paul F. Diehl, the Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science at the UI. “(W)hen peacekeepers are deployed, the likelihood that conflicting parties will attempt direct negotiations or accept offers of mediation to help settle their conflict is sharply reduced,” they wrote in an article in the March issue of the Yale Journal of International Affairs. As a result, a peacekeeping force “can, paradoxically, undermine the achievement of a comprehensive peace agreement.” Greig and Diehl call it the “peacekeepingpeacemaking dilemma,” and their conclusions are based on the analysis of data from civil wars and wars between nation-states since 1945 – though peacekeeping operations have been much more numerous in recent decades. Perhaps the classic example is Cyprus, Diehl said, where peacekeeping forces remain nearly a half-century after they were first deployed. Looking at civil wars, the authors found that the presence of peacekeepers “appears
“I think the point of our research is that there shouldn’t be an illusion that a peacekeeping force is a panacea that solves all different kinds of problems and has all positive effects,” he said. Instead, policymakers choosing whether to insert a peacekeeping force should recognize that each choice is a tradeoff and “incomplete,” Diehl said. In some cases, conditions may almost require international intervention to contain an escalating conflict or prevent mass killing. “That’s a pretty good tradeoff,” he said, even if it makes long-term peace more difficult. Paul Diehl was interviewed by UIUC News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain. This interview appeared on the News Bureau’s website on April 23.
Finnish peacekeeping troops in Chad. (Juha Honkala)
to offer no improvement in the chances that diplomatic efforts to manage the conflict will be successful.” In wars between nation-states, “peacekeeping actually reduces the odds that diplomacy will produce a settlement,” they write. The most successful peacekeeping operations, by a variety of measures, according to the authors, are those deployed after a peace agreement. Greig and Diehl began their research more than a decade ago, when Greig was a doctoral student at Illinois and Diehl his adviser. They published their conclusions for the first time in 2005, and have added to their research since. The recent journal article lays out their case for a diplomatic, rather than academic, audience. The subject also is part of their book “International Mediation” (Polity Press), published in the US in June. “We’re the first ones to have the evidence to really show that this effect is there,” Diehl said, and it’s evidence that runs strongly against the conventional view of the peacekeeping-peacemaking relationship.That view holds that intense conflict makes long-term peace more difficult to achieve, for a variety of reasons. Peacekeepers can separate warring parties and reduce the violence, opening the way for negotiation. It’s a view, however, based on “wishful thinking,” rather than systematic research, Diehl said. “They just automatically assume that peacekeeping must be a good idea, or they hope that it’s a good idea.” The alternative, more-pessimistic view holds that before warring parties are ready to bargain for peace, they often must reach what another scholar has called a “hurting stalemate,” Diehl said. In such a stalemate, the parties have reached a point where neither can defeat the other militarily, and yet they continue to bear a high price in casualties and lost resources. In other words, the pain of that stalemate produces incentives to make long-term peace, Diehl said. Peacekeepers can help reduce the violence in the short-term, but by doing so, they often reduce the pain and therefore the incentive for long-term peace. The researchers’ conclusions strongly support this alternative, cost-benefit view, Diehl said. While it might seem as if Greig and Diehl’s research argues for a hands-off approach to any conflict, letting belligerents fight it out until the costs force them to make peace, Diehl says that is not the intention.
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Joe Hinchliffe gets some last minute emails in before the cermony starts. Bill Bernhard is ready for the crowds. Rabiya Bilfaqi answers a question from Professor John Vasquez. Professor Laura Hastings talks with parents as Chris Olen (midway behind) and Michael Ova (in back) explain their work. Anika Hermann and her poster. Professor JosĂŠ Cheibub and Lynn Rudasill (far- and mid-left) engage presenters and parents.
Su Jin An walks the Director of Undergraduate Studies through her argument. 8. Karolina Wasniewska explains her conclusions to a fellow student. 9. Students stand for recognition from their parents, instructors, and fellow students at the awards ceremony. 10. Conversations around the presenters lasted all morning. 11. Bill Bernhard thanks parents for support ing their students. 12. Awardees and presenters decided another photographer was more worth watching.
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Department of Political Science / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 420 David Kinley Hall / 1407 W Gregory Drive / Urbana, IL 61801 217.333.3881 / pol@illinois.edu / pol.illinois.edu   Cover: A pedestrian walks past a line of state police assembled in advance of protests at the NATO convention in Chicago, May 2012. (James Watkins)